1 research outputs found
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is an ambitious, multi-institutional project to
create a huge digital imaging and spectroscopic data bank of 25% of the
celestial sphere, approximately 10,000 deg^2 centred on the north galactic
polar cap. The photometric atlas will be in 5 specially-chosen colours,
covering the pi ster of the Survey area to a limiting magnitude of r~23.1, on
0.4" pixels, resulting in a 1 Tpixel map. This data base will be automatically
analysed to catalog the photometric and astrometric properties of 10^8 stellar
images, 10^8 galaxies, and 10^6 colour-selected QSO candidates; the galaxy data
will in addition include detailed morphological data. The photometric data are
used to autonomously and homogeneously select objects for the spectroscopic
survey, which will include spectra of 10^6 galaxies, 10^5 QSOs, and 10^5
unusual stars. Although the project was originally motivated by the desire to
study Large Scale Structure, we anticipate that these data will impact
virtually every field of astronomy, from Earth-crossing asteroids to QSOs at
z>6. In particular, the ~12 TByte multi-colour, precision calibrated imaging
archive should be a world resource for many decades of the next century.Comment: On behalf of the entire scientific and technical team of the Survey.
Paper presented at "Discussion Meeting on Large Scale Structure in the
Universe," Royal Society, London, March 1998; 11 pages including 2 figures
and no tables. To appear in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
of London A, 1998. Requires LaTeX and rspublic.sty. Revised version: typos
corrected, very slight additions, references update